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Someone had kept them alive.
Madison appeared behind me.
“I came here sometimes,” she said.
I turned.
She leaned against the doorway. “After fights with Dad. After signing things. After being awful to you.”
I looked at the lavender.
“You never said.”
“You wouldn’t have believed me.”
“No,” I admitted. “I wouldn’t have.”
She stepped inside. “Do you think we can ever be sisters? Not just survivors of the same man?”
The question hurt because it was hopeful.
“I don’t know,” I said.
She nodded.
Then I added, “But I want to find out.”
Madison’s face crumpled, and suddenly we were hugging, awkwardly at first, then desperately. She smelled like hospital soap and the vanilla perfume she always wore. I cried into her shoulder for the childhood we lost, the years we misunderstood, the love we had mistaken for competition because our father had rationed it like money.
From the house, my mother watched through the glass.
She did not come in.
Not yet.
But she saw us.
And for the first time, she did not look away.
That evening, Detective Hale called us back into the study with news that changed everything.
“We found a final video file,” he said. “Recorded by Rose Brooks herself.”
My grandmother’s face appeared on the screen.
Older than I remembered. Frail. Wrapped in a blue shawl. But her eyes were still bright.
She looked straight into the camera.
“If Richard has forced this recording into the light,” she said, “then my granddaughters are in danger. Natalie, Madison, listen carefully. Your father’s greatest secret is not what he took.”
She leaned closer.
“It is who he erased.”
PART 7 — The Daughter No One Buried
For several seconds after the video ended, nobody breathed properly.
Who he erased.
The words crawled through the room like cold smoke.
My mother stood so quickly the chair struck the wall behind her.
“No,” she said.
Madison turned to her. “Mom?”
Elaine’s lips parted, but no sound came out.
Detective Hale watched her carefully. “Mrs. Brooks?”
My mother pressed both hands to her temples. “I didn’t know. I swear I didn’t know what happened to her.”
“To who?” I demanded.
My mother looked at me, and the expression on her face made me feel suddenly very young.
“Your aunt,” she whispered. “Lydia.”
I had heard the name once.
Only once.
When I was seven, I found an old photograph tucked into one of Grandmother’s books: a teenage girl with dark curls, laughing on the estate steps beside my father. She had his eyes but not his hardness.
When I asked who she was, my father snatched the photo away and said, “No one.”
Later, Grandmother told me Lydia had been his sister.
“She left,” Grandmother said.
“Why?”
Grandmother had looked toward the door before answering.
“Because some houses teach birds to fear the sky.”
Now my mother gripped the desk as though the room had become a ship in a storm.
“Richard said Lydia ran away,” she said. “He said she stole money from the family and disappeared. Rose never believed him, but there was no proof.”
Detective Hale’s voice was measured. “The video suggests Rose believed Lydia was alive.”
My mother squeezed her eyes shut.
“There were letters,” she said. “Years ago. Rose thought Lydia had sent them. Richard said they were fake. Cruel pranks.”
“What did the letters say?” I asked.
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